You're running in your
first election for City Council in a crowded field of 26
candidates. Nine will be elected. The No. 1 local anchorman
comes on TV at about 9:15 PM and announces that you're going
to do very well for a first time candidate, then flashes on
the screen that you're running 12th; only three places from
victory. Such a finish would give hope to all who were
daring to "fight city hall."

Earlier in the
evening, a liberal-leftist home-town university professor
who was analyzing early returns for another local TV station
had projected that your arch-rival, and his ally the
sweetheart of the anti-God portion of the establishment was
headed towards defeat.

But HO-L-L-L-D
EVERYTHING ! ! !

At approximately 9:45
PM, the same anchorman announces that there has been a
computer breakdown. 45 minutes later when the computers come
back up, a massive switch has occurred. You and 7 other
feisty challengers have fallen to the very bottom of the
heap. The establishment sweetheart has jumped into a winning
position against all odds. Despite unprecedented public
dissatisfaction, the same old faces are elected once again.
Many conclude that "you just can't fight city hall." Things
have worked out just great for all those entrenched
politicians who seemed to be the object of such public
dissatisfaction right up to election day. The next morning,
you scan the papers in vain for any mention of the computer
breakdown: no record for posterity.

The above scenario is
my story, but it was happening in dozens of places all
across the nation. It was 1979 and a new day had quietly
dawned in America - UNVERIFIABLE, RIGGABLE computerized vote
tabulation.

Ballots
for Bullets

When I was small I
remember my Dad saying how in other countries they would
shoot each other to decide the transfer of power. In our
country it was done by the ballot at election
time.

Millions of American
soldiers have fought and bled and died to protect your right
to free and fair elections; to protect your right to an
orderly, peaceful transfer of power when the people so
will.

How
Your Parents' Votes Were Counted

Once upon a time,
Americans voted by Paper Ballot. At the end of the day after
the polls had closed, neighborhood people, Democrats and
Republicans, worked together to count the votes in the
precinct (polling place) BEFORE the votes left that
precinct. The count was then posted at the precinct polling
place for all to see. This is the only way to insure a
verifiable election. Variations of method are possible, but
the elements of physical ballots which are counted and
posted at the precinct before the ballots leave each
precinct are essential to insure a fair and honest
count.

To rig an election
with the above safeguards built in, one would have to bribe
many hundreds of neighborhood people, including key
Democrats and Republicans in each precinct you hoped to rig.
Finally, the group of people bribed at each precinct would
only have access to a tiny fraction of the
vote.

The
Greatest Coverup Begins

About 1974 a sinister
development was in full swing all over the United States. In
many areas, especially high populations regions, the votes
were no longer being counted in the precincts by
neighborhood people. The switch was on to computer vote
counting systems. Typical was Cincinnati, Ohio where votes
were bundled up immediately after the polls closed and sent
to a mysterious central computer room to be counted by
secret computer codes. To add insult to injury, the votes
were counted away from the watchful eye of the entire
electorate and the press.

Despite the brutal
cover up that has been conducted for going on three decades
by the news media and the major parties to prevent you from
hearing about this issue, some major media news items have
appeared. In a rare but superb news story on the eve of the
1988 Presidential election, Dan Rather (CBS Evening News)
engaged in this exchange with computer expert Howard J.
Strauss of Princeton University:

Rather:
"Realistically, could the fix be put on in a national
election?"

Strauss: "Get me a job
with the company that writes the software for this program.
(ed: Strauss was referring to the most common computer
program in use) Then I'd have access to one third of the
votes. Is that enough to fix a general
election?"

"A
House Without Doors"

In an earlier clip
during this CBS interview, Howard J. Strauss dropped this
bombshell: "When it comes to computerized elections, there
are no safeguards. It's not a door without locks, it's a
house without doors." The most succinct introductory summary
to this mind-blowing subject is found in Votescam: The
Stealing of America by James & Kenneth
Collier.

The chapter begins by
quoting the first words spoken by President-elect, George
Bush in his Nov. 8, 1988 victory speech in Houston, Texas.
Bush said: "We can now speak the most majestic words a
democracy can offer: "The people have spoken. . .
"

The Colliers comment:
"It was not "the People" of the United States who did 'the
speaking' on that election day, although most of them
believed it was, and still believe it. In fact, the People
did not speak at all. The voices most of us really heard
that day were the voices of computers strong, loud,
authoritative, unquestioned in their electronic
finality....

Trade
Secrets

The computers that
spoke in November 1988 held in their inner workings small
boxes that contained secret codes that only the sellers of
the computers could read. The programs, or "source codes,"
were regarded as "trade secrets." The sellers of the
vote-counting software zealously guarded their programs from
the public, from election officials, from everyone on the
dubious grounds that competitors could steal their ideas if
the source codes were open to inspection....

You may ask: What
"ideas" does it require to count something as simple as
ballots? Can the "ideas" be much more complex than, let's
say, a supermarket computerized cash register or an
automatic bank teller machine?

The computer voting
machines do not have to do anything complicated at all; they
simply must be able to register votes for the correct
candidate or party or proposal, tabulate them, count them
up, and deliver arithmetically correct
additions....

People with no formal
training, even children, used to do it all the time. So why
can't the public know what those secret source codes
instruct the computers to do?

It only makes common
sense that every gear, every mechanism, every nook and
cranny of every part of the voting process ought to be in
the sunlight, wide open to public view. How else can the
public be reasonably assured that they are participating in
an unrigged election where their vote actually means
something? Yet one of the most mysterious, low-profile,
covert, shadowy, questionable mechanisms of American
democracy is the American vote count....

Computers in voting
machines are effectively immune from checking and
rechecking. If they are fixed, you cannot know it, and you
cannot be sure at all of an honest tally."

If you understand the
above quoted paragraphs, you understand the
problem.

Crash,
Cover-up, Lawsuit, Fix

Among the many
struggles which have taken place all over the USA in the
last few decades over this issue, I can speak about only one
from first hand experience: Cincinnati, Ohio (covered on
page 242-247 in the Collier book.) Fortunately, the
Cincinnati case illustrates as well as any other instance
how the establishment media and both major parties coalesce
to thwart any attempt to get rid of their precious, riggable
computer vote counting systems.

"How Elections Are
Stolen" in American Opinion magazine written in 1977 by Dr.
Susan L.M. Huck alerted me to the dangers of computerized
vote counting systems. When we actually witnessed our very
own computer crash in 1979 (described on Page 1) during
which everything worked out perfectly for the "in-crowd" I
knew something big and bad was up. When the Cincinnati
newspapers failed to mention the computer crash the next
morning and the accompanying candidate position shake up
this was our first taste of the media blackout that dozens
of other concerned citizens were experiencing all over the
nation.

After due research and
preparation, we filed suit against our local Board of
Elections in 1981, and after 4 years of public service
litigation conducted by my Father, James J. Condit Sr., our
side won a decisive victory. Judge Richard Niehaus ruled:
"There is no adequate and proper safeguard against the
computers being programmed to distort the election results."
What the Judge's ruling means, is that thousands of your
votes can be switched in the blink of an eye and no one
would ever be the wiser!

Judge Niehaus also
issued a court order allowing us and our chosen experts "to
observe all phases of the election process" on election
night 1985 with a view that we bring evidence back to his
court so that the situation could be properly
remedied.

Shortly before this
court ruling, my mother-in-law had providentially alerted me
to a series called Votescam by the Collier brothers being
carried in the Washington DC-based weekly newspaper, The
Spotlight. Thanks to this tip, I was able to ask the
Colliers to serve as two of our court-approved experts. As
reported in their book, the Colliers had already
video-filmed women punching votes out of voters' ballots at
the Board of Elections on election night 1982 in Miami,
Florida.

And to my surprise
(but not to theirs), the Colliers also caught women on
camera plucking votes out of punchcard ballots in
Cincinnati, this time using household
tweezers.

Disappointingly, Judge
Niehaus (in his tennis shoes) was summoned down to the Board
of Elections at about 7:30 PM on that 1985 election night by
the heads of both the Republican and Democratic Parties. The
Judge, in a highly unusual move, modified his court order on
the spot insisting that observing "all phases of the
election process" did not include
videotaping!

The audio portion of
the confrontation between Ken Collier on the one hand, and
the Judge and both local Party heads on the other, is
captured on a video camera which was pointed at the floor
during the tense exchange. The Colliers were told to quit
videotaping under threat of arrest.

The next morning we
appeared on the Jan Mickelson Show on WCKY Talk Radio.
Mickelson, who is one of the top Talk Show Hosts in the
country, was skeptical when Ken Collier asserted that we had
video-film of women pulling votes out of ballots with common
household tweezers. He shot a quick glance my way as if he
were having second thoughts about having let us on the air
at all. But then our credibility shot sky-high when no one
from the Board of Elections was willing to come on the air
against us.

Back to election
night: While the Colliers' videotaping efforts were causing
such consternation to the Election officials, our other
court-approved expert, Mr. Robert Strunk, was moving quietly
through the system with my Father.

Mr. Strunk, a highly
respected computer analyst who once headed the Xavier
University computer department, issued a magnificent report
to the Court detailing why the computer vote counting system
was NOT verifiable. Mr. Strunk said that to believe the
published results under this computer system was "an act of
faith."

Please observe that
the conclusions of Mr. Strauss and Mr. Strunk, as well as
the conclusions of dozens of other honest computer experts,
agree completely on the unverifiability of these computer
vote counting systems. As far as we know, there is not one
computer expert in the nation who has gone on record in an
attempt to refute these scholarly
individuals.

Despite his previous
fine decisions, Judge Niehaus, perhaps feeling the heat from
the local power structure, excused himself from taking any
action to remedy the riggable computer system by announcing
that he was a "pacifist" judge whatever that means. We
appealed, and two years later in 1987 our deplorable Court
of Appeals dismissed the six year-old case stating absurdly
that the county judge did not have any jurisdiction over the
county computer vote counting system.

Whistle-blowers
Emerge

In the meantime,
something momentous happened. Two whistle-blowers had come
forth from Cincinnati Bell. One of them eventually testified
in convincing detail during court proceedings connected with
our lawsuit that he had been involved in causing a computer
crash while helping to alter the local 1979 election by
wiretapping into our computer vote counting system. (The
reader will recall that this was the very year we had been
stunned by the candidate shake-up which occurred seemingly
during the computer shutdown.). The key whistle-blower had
already watched for several years as a Congressman, the FBI,
and all the press stonewalled his evidence.

On election eve 1986,
Cincinnatus Political Action Committee, our local political
vehicle, had issued a press release asking the media how
they could ignore Judge Niehaus's finding and continue to
report local elections as business as usual when the same
riggable computer system was still counting the votes. Only
Channel 12 responded and took a brief statement from me, but
the spot they aired right after Monday Night Football caught
the attention of the key whistle-blower, and he contacted us
the next day, election day '86.

After another year of
being stonewalled, we convinced the frustrated
whistle-blowers that the only way to break through the media
censorship was to utilize a little known law which forces TV
and radio stations to accept a candidate's political ads
provided no obscenity is involved.

Days before our TV ad
featuring the whistle-blowers was to air, Judge Niehaus
again played a key role when he ruled favorably on my
Father's request to allow the key whistle-blower to enter
his sworn testimony about wiretapping the computer on
election nights as well as causing that crash in 1979 into
our suit against the Board of Elections, which had not yet
been thrown out by the Court of Appeals. Together the TV ad
and the sworn testimony combined to spark the only two
significant local major media reports that have ever
appeared. Anchor Nick Clooney and reporter Mary Krutko of
Channel 12 aired an excellent, in-depth local TV segment,
and twenty minutes later during the same newscast our TV ad
featuring the whistle-blowers ran.

The next morning (Oct.
30, 1987), reporter Randy Ludlow wrote an outstanding
article in the Cincinnati Post. But these two reports
alerted the Media Moguls and the media curtain of censorship
was slammed down.

Eventually a
cornucopia of press coverage did ensue but it focused on
other aspects of the story, while maintaining the brutal
cover-up of the vote fraud issue. All the rest of the
coverage was devoted to relative trivia such as which
millionaires and organizations had been allegedly phone
tapped, speculation as to why, etc. etc. etc.

By time the smoke had
cleared in the wiretapping story, 5 policemen had resigned
in disgrace and Cincinnati Bell admitted one of its trucks
had been used in wiretapping activities. The Wall Street
Journal had mentioned the story, local Cincinnati
newspapers, TV, and radio stations combined to carry over
400 reports and 60 Minutes aired a segment on the Cincinnati
wiretapping story. The chief computer man at the local Board
of Elections admitted under oath that if someone had the
relevant codes he would have a 100% chance to alter the
election results.

But omitted from all
major media press coverage, with the two already noted
exceptions, was any intelligible reporting on the votefraud
aspect of the story. (Several highly explosive radio shows
featuring the Colliers, the whistle-blowers, and myself are
preserved on audiotape. Our TV commercial featuring the
whistle-blowers and the local Channel 12 spot is preserved
on videotape as is an hour interview which I conducted with
one of the whistle-blowers early on just in case we had not
been able to break through the media
curtain.)

New
Yorker Magazine, Dan Rather, and the U.S. Department of
Commerce

Even though 99% of the
investigative reporting on votescam has been done by private
citizens and non-establishment investigators (for instance,
while the "respectable" New York Times has done only 3
stories on the subject, the "persona non grata" Spotlight
weekly was carrying over 300 stories), there have been
enough establishment sponsored stories to demonstrate that
the major news media has what some call "guilty
knowledge."

On the eve of the
Bush-Dukakis election, Ronnie Dugger broke the almost total
silence in the major media on votescam when his article "The
Dangers of Computerized Voting" appeared as a cover story in
the Nov. 7, 1988 issue of New Yorker magazine (This dynamite
article is available in most libraries).

Dugger, who visited me
for a week in Cincinnati during the wiretapping uproar,
exerted his journalistic skills to present this issue in an
undeniably credible manner. He documented the activities of
many and varied citizens, candidates, and experts generally
unknown to each other who have been working on votescam in
virtually every region of the country from the early 70's to
the present day.

Within days of the
appearance of the New Yorker cover story, CBS Evening News
with Dan Rather carried the only report to date to appear on
a major TV network, featuring computer expert Dr. Howard J.
Strauss. We have also preserved this excellent 5 minute
report on videotape.

In August of 1988, the
U.S. Bureau of Commerce published a comprehensive study
under the auspices of the National Bureau of Standards by
Roy G. Saltman, Special Publication 500-158 entitled
"Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized
Vote-Tallying."

This is probably the
most comprehensive compilation of all the lawsuits and other
aspects which surround the issue of computerized voting
published thus far. This government study supports Dugger's
article, as well as supplies mountains of evidence
documenting the problems with computer vote-counting
systems.

The fact that Saltman
failed to pick up our Cincinnati case -- which featured both
the most decisive judicial ruling and the only
whistle-blower to come forth to date -- demonstrates the
difficulty faced by even a well-funded government agency in
compiling a comprehensive list of all the efforts that have
been conducted to expose the dangers of computerized vote
tabulating.

The thus-far
successful suppression of the votescam issue from widespread
public notice is a chilling demonstration of major media
censorship in America.

Why
Does the Board Of Elections Exist?

The Boards of Election
exist for one reason: to guarantee that the results
published on election night are in fact the will of the
people; to insure in a way that can be verified that what
the people voted in the thousands of neighborhood pollings
places is what shows up as the final results. It doesn't
matter how many pieces of literature are distributed, or how
many TV campaign commercials run, or how much shouting goes
on, or how many debates are televised.

If the computer
programs which "count" our votes are poised to switch key
votes in the blink of an eye, the rest just doesn't matter.
As computer whiz Howard J. Strauss said at the end of that
lone 1988 CBS Evening News report: "Should we make it
voluntary that we have safe elections or should we demand
safe elections?"